“The sense,” she said, “must lie in the scrabble I can’t make out.”
Fortinbras put on his spectacles and when, not without difficulty, he had deciphered it, he took off the spectacles and smiled the benevolent smile of the Marchand de Bonheur.
“Leave it to me, my dear,” said he. “I will answer Corinna.”
In the tiny town of Wendlebury, in the noisy bosom of her family, Corinna was eating her heart out. During the latter days of June she had returned to the fold, an impecunious failure. As a matter of theory she had upheld the principles of woman suffrage. As a matter of practice, in the effort to obtain it, she loathed it with bitter hatred. She lacked the inspiration of its overwhelming importance in sublunary affairs. She was willing enough to do ordinary work in its interests, at a living wage, even to the odious extent of wearing an anæmic tricolor and selling newspapers in the streets. But when her duties involved incendiarism, imprisonment and hunger, striking, Corinna revolted. She had neither the conviction nor the courage. Miss Banditch reviled her for a recreant, a snake in the grass and a spineless doll and left the flat, forswearing her acquaintance for ever. Headquarters signified disapproval of her pusillanimity. Driven to desperation she signified her disapproval of Headquarters in unmeasured terms. The end came and prospective starvation drove her home to Wendlebury. When the war broke out, in common with the rest of the young maidenhood of the town, she yearned to do something to help the British Empire. Her sister Clara, to satisfy this laudable craving, promptly married a subaltern, and, when he was ordered to the front, went to live with his people. The next youngest sister, Evelyn, anxious for Red Cross work, found herself subsidised by an aunt notoriously inimical to Corinna. Corinna therefore had to throw in her lot with Margaret and Winnie, chits of fifteen and thirteen—the intervening boys having flown from the nest. What was a penniless and, in practical matters, a feckless young woman to do? She knitted socks and mufflers and went round the town collecting money for Belgian refugees. So did a score of tabbies, objects of Corinna’s scornful raillery who district-visited the poor to exasperation. She demanded work more glorious, more heroic; but lack of funds tied her to detested knitting-needles. As the Vicar’s daughter she was compelled to go to church and listen to her father’s sermons on the war; compared with which infliction, she tartly informed her mother, forcible feeding was a gay amusement.
Once or twice she had a postcard from Martin in the Argonne. She cursed herself, her destiny and her sex. If only she was a man she would at least have gone forth with a gun on her shoulder. But she was a woman; the most helpless thing in women God ever made. Even her mother, whom she had rated low on account of intellectual short-comings, she began to envy. At any rate she had generously performed her woman’s duty. She had brought forth ten children, five men children, two of whom had rushed to take up arms in defence of their country. Martin’s last postcard had told Corinna of Bigourdin being called away to fight. In her enforced isolation from the great events of the great world she became acutely conscious that in all the great world only one individual had ever found a use for her. A flash of such knowledge either scorches or illuminates the soul.
Then early in November she received a misspelt letter laboriously written in hard pencil on thin, glazed paper. It was addressed from a hospital in the North of France.
Mademoiselle Corinna:
I have done my best to strike a blow for my beloved country. It was written that I should do so, and it was written perhaps that I should give my life for her. I am dictating these words to my bedside neighbour who is wounded in the knee. For my part, a German bullet has penetrated my lung, and the doctors say I may not live. But while I still can speak, I am anxious to tell you that on the battlefield your image has always been before my eyes and that I always have in my heart a love for you tender and devoted. Should I live, Mademoiselle, I pray you to forget this letter, as I do not wish to cause you pain. But should I die, let me now have the consolation of believing that I shall have a place in your thoughts as one who has died, not unworthily or unwillingly, in a noble cause.
Gaspard-Marie Bigourdin.